On Nov 17, 2007 1:08 PM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Angela announced that Wikia has released http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/ImageTagging/ demo: http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Sydney_for_image_tagging_demo.jpg
Magnus has a somewhat similar thing via Javascript http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:ImageBoxes.js .
I find Magnus' more intuitive in that you mouseover the image to see the boxes, rather than mousing over the names of the annotations.
But they are both a bit problematic in that they don't record the edit action in any standard way. You don't know who added or removed any annotation, there's no history, no ability to revert. If someone added an offensive tag to many images there'd be no way to even find out which images they tagged - would there?
My solution handles the tags as normal edits, that is, adding a template.
You actually have to do the edit yourself at the moment, after copying the template text from a dialog box. I meant to automate this, but since there was little enthusiasm by the community, I put it on the back burner.
There is also a design issue to be decided. Should tags be * exclusively category names, as it is now * normal links to all namespaces (requires typing "category", and can be followed only through "what links here" from non-category pages) * exclusively category names with a special prefix (like "Bee" could become "Category:Tag:Bee")
The third possiblity would separate the tags from our "normal" system. Is that what we want? I don't know. The second one is great for image-to-page links (click on the box in the image and go to a gallery or category), but bad for the other direction ("what articles have tags "flower" and "bee"?).
Maybe a combination of 1&2 or 2&3 is the answer.
Cheers, Magnus